Mexican Banks Hacked – Leading To Large Cash Withdrawals

Several banks in Mexico have experienced large cash transfers in recent weeks after cyber-criminals infiltrated some financial institutions which led to unauthorized transactions, as claimed by the central bank in an interview with Bloomberg.

Banco de Mexico has zeroed in on 5 financial institutions that have had their external connection to the central banks electronic payment system compromised, as claimed by the central banks head of operations Lorenza Martinez.

The vulnerability in the banks system led to money being illegally drawn from “fake accounts” at those firms and led to a large amount of cash to get withdrawn from other banks.

The five banks that were a target of cyber-attack and brokers are working with Mexico’s attorney general to figure out whether organized criminals helped in carrying out this cyber-attack; however Banxico is not involved in this investigation.

Martinez has declined to name the affected companies and even claims that it’s too early to comment on the number of actors behind these incidents. It has been 2 weeks since the financial authority asked some of their lenders to connect to their payment transfer network via a back-up schemes after a suspected cyber-attack destroyed some transfers.

These measures have causes slowness in transfer for many consumers. Now, more than twenty Mexican financial organizations have organised back-up plans. It has been reported last week that Grupo Financiero Banorte, Banco del Bajio SA and Banco del Ejercito were the banks that were targeted directly through a suspected cyber-attack.

Martinez said, “While vulnerabilities were discovered at the end of last month, at least one bank experienced an incident as recently as this week, some of the cash was withdrawn from accounts that had just recently been opened.”

The central bank is also investigating whether the affected banks were complying with the security regulations or not.